posted on: 09 November 2016,
posted by: Simon Overington-Hickford

Claire Cunningham and Jess Curtis. The Way You Look (At Me) Tonight. Performed at Southbank Centre's Unlimited Festival 2016. Image by Rachel Cherry for Unlimited.

(or just how many people applied to the recent Unlimited commissions call out)

Monday 7th November 2016 was a hive of activity at Unlimited Central as we closed the application portals for Expressions of Interest to the current Unlimited commission streams. So just how many people applied?

2016 saw us offer three different award streams for the first time – our Main commissions, a new stream for Emerging artists, and our International collaborations, thanks to funding from ACE, Arts Council of Wales, Spirit of 2012 and British Council. Across all the commissions we had an amazing 227 applications.

If we were to fund every application we received we’d need over £5 million – a total of £5,799,529 to be exact.

We had applications across all art forms – combined arts (70), visual arts (60), theatre (55), dance (15), music (12), literature (5), and some which defied categorisation and so referred to themselves as ‘other’ (10); We were also pleased to see that our applicants come from all over England and the UK. In England, we log people according to the Arts Council England regions – applications came from London (70), North (48), South East (41), South West (25), and Midlands (22); we also received a number of applications from Wales (13), Scotland (7) and Northern Ireland (1) for relevant schemes. Expressions of Interest for our International collaborations came from disabled artists across 15 different countries spanning 5 continents. We’ll be delving into the data further to look at diversity soon, but those are the headlines for now.

So, what happens next?

All the applications will be checked to make sure that they contain what they need to, that any web links and attachments all work fine, and then passed over to the panel members for them to create ‘long lists’ (find out more about our new panel members here). Each panel member long lists their preferred applications and these are put together to create the shortlists for each of the panels, which will be announced on 5th December.